After being frustrated by the results in a Google search yet again, I submitted the following feedback to Google under the category “Google’s search results weren’t helpful” and the sub-category “The results included a page that was irrelevant”:
You searched for shaw vod 33319.
Please list which site or sites were irrelevant.
http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=55214
http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=127023
https://secure.shaw.ca/apps/digital_services/GuideErrors.asp… and probably the rest of the results, but I didn’t go past the top three.
Why were they irrelevant?
I’m finding more and more that Google ignores one or more of my search terms, trying to be too clever for its own good. For example, while the third result on the secure.shaw.ca domain would be relevant if I was looking for a way to contact my cable company (Shaw) about the VOD (video on demand) error (33319) I am receiving, it’s absolutely useless as a result that tells me immediately what error 33319 is.
In this case “33319” does not even appear anywhere in the page at any of the top three search results. Why then are these pages included in the results if I’m searching for “all of the words” (Google’s wording) I have entered, and not “one or more of these words”? And this happens even when all of my search terms are actually words, unlike this case where one of the search terms is a string of numbers.
Please don’t make me use a Microsoft product for my searches. The last time I switched search engines was from AltaVista to Google.
For those of you with short memories or who weren’t around “BG” (before Google), AltaVista was the search engine back in the day. They even provided search results for Yahoo, before going into decline and eventually becoming a part of Yahoo. Now it’s just a point of entry into the Yahoo search system. I don’t even remember exactly when I switched, but it was probably in the early 2000’s.